Understanding Entries

• Taxonomies in DIYbiosphere
  • Collections
    • Possible Collections
  • Type of Initiative
  • Tags
  • Status
• Other data keys
• Rendering the Entries

Each initiative added to the repository has its own Entry. Each entry has its own folder in the sphere repository. The folder can have images and must have a text file in markdown to be rendered as a webpage.

Taxonomies in DIYbiosphere

There are four main attributes that aggregate entries: collections, type, tags, and status

Collections

Collections are predetermined and are separated as distinct folders in the sphere repository preceded by an underscore. The ones currently in use are:

• _projects: have particular aims, such as designing an instrument or an educational workshop.
• _startups: are entrepreneurial ventures and generally concern products or services
• _labs: are dedicated physical spaces with materials and equipment dedicated to support DIYbio related activities. Labs can be static or mobile.
• _incubators: are organizations and spaces that help projects and startups to develop
• _groups: are associations of people (online and offline) that are interested in DIYbio related topics or activities. A group does not have a dedicated Lab space, but they may plan to have one.
• _networks: a website, service or organization that facilitates communication and collaboration between individuals and organizations with interests in DIYbio.
• _events: Global or regional events that are by and/or for the DIYbio community, like (un)conferences, camps, hackathons, and accelerators. Only include if something shareable is produced, like proceedings, videos or posters.
• _others: Is an umbrella term for all the rest. Eventually as new entries begin to define themselves a new collection will be created to accommodate them.

Possible Collections

As the number of entries grows, we may need to add more colelctions. Some that have been proposed are:

• company: a commercial business, could be for-profit or non-profit
• products: physical things that can be purchased
• services: abstract things that can be purchased
• protocols: how-to’s for experiments, workshops, etc.
• profiles: for people. Nothing personal, just their ‘DIYbio career’
• funders: Grants, VC’s, websites, that provide funding for DIYbio initiatives
• reads: Media, scholarly, and other articles and important posts on DIYbio

Type of Initiative

The type is for specifying the kind of social/legal configuration of the initiative. Although not predetermined, these should be standardized as much as possible. These are some recommended values:

• community
• non-profit
• university
• company/non-profit
• school
• museum

Tags

The tags are keywords that describe entries. Tags are not predetermined but should be as standardized as possible. There might be overlaps as some people may write the collection name, or the type as a tag. These should standardize and an assessment should follow to determine if new collections, or types should be created.

Status

The status: key is automatically generated by _plugins/add-variables-to-files.rb and we only recommend to input it manually in the front matter if it should be something other than what is automatically generated. The code marks status: automatically to ‘unknown’, unless start-date: is in the past then : active, unless end-date: is in the past then : inactive, unless start-date: is in the future then : planned.

The status should be completely standardized and should only have one of the following:

• unknown
• active
• inactive
• planned
• hiatus

Other data keys

Rendering the Entries